"Though the man is dead, the truth he sang is not. Heed it, monsieur, as a warning from the dead to the living, a warning to all brave men who unwarily trust in women!"
"I needed no song to warn me, mademoiselle," I said, thinking of Mlle. d'Arency and M. de Noyard. "I have in my own time seen something of the treachery of which some women are capable."
"You have loved other women?" she said, quickly.
"Once I thought I loved one, until I learned what she was."
"What was she?" she asked, slowly, as if divining the answer, and dreading to hear it.
"She was a tool of Catherine de Medici's," said I, speaking with all the more contempt when I compared the guileful court beauty, Mlle. d'Arency, with the pure, sweet woman before me; "one of those creatures whom Catherine called her Flying Squadron, and she betrayed a very honest gentleman to his death."
"Betrayed him!" she repeated.
"Yes, by a pretended love tryst."
Mademoiselle trembled, and held out her hand to the dial for support.
Something in her attitude, something in the pose of her slender figure, something in her white face, her deep, wide-open eyes, so appealed to my love, to my impulse to protect her, that I clasped her in my arms, and drew her close to me. She made no attempt to repulse me, and into her eyes came the look of surrender and yielding.